More on GE's tax avoidance

Five Ways GE Plays The Tax Game

When it comes to interpreting the intricacies of tax accounting, few companies can match the depth of personnel GE hires for its tax department. What makes GE unusual, according to tax lawyers and accountants, is its practice of recruiting dozens of former tax officials from Washington's official tax world. 

"An important rule to live by," a senior GE tax lawyer, Rick D'Avino, told a conference in 2007, "is to ensure that the tax team has as many former government tax experts as possible" to "help see both sides of an issue more effectively." D'Avino, a GE vice president, mentioned the IRS, Capitol Hill and Treasury as places to look when building a team and talked about how a former IRS lawyer working for GE helped the company build a "cooperative relationship" with the service. 

The next year, GE hired the senior IRS official who was overseeing the service's transfer pricing program, under which large multinational companies like GE negotiate with the IRS about how to price products and services among subsidiaries. The subject is controversial because it can allow companies to shift profits to lower-tax countries. 

Samuels, the head of GE's tax department, is a former Treasury tax official himself.

The real tax avoidance scandal centers on dividends and capital gains

The scandal is not that GE is paying no U.S. taxes for 2010; that will be temporary. The scandal is that we’re not facing the realities of globalized business. Liberals would penalize U.S. multinationals by raising their taxes; conservatives champion dubious tax cuts for the rich. Whatever their partisan appeal, these policies do little for the economy. It’s true that many factors influence where companies expand: wage rates, local markets, government regulations, exchange rates. But if we take away one factor — taxes — we’re crippling our ability to compete for global business.

Setting The Record Straight on GE’s Taxes